PCM notched its second massive acquisition of 2015, entering Canada by purchasing Acrodex, a 445-employee, $111 million managed services giant specializing in cloud, staff augmentation and professional services.

With all the talk about whether Dell can handle the overlap between its Compellent storage and EMC's VNX, it's easy to forget that Dell has been successfully managing multiple overlapping storage lines for years.

The hottest conversation at Dell's annual conference in Austin, Texas this week is how EMC solution providers can cozy up to Dell in the wake of Dell's $67 billion acquisition of the storage market leader.

The new training and services, revealed at this year's NetApp Insight program, are aimed at helping partners find better ways to bring customers to hybrid platforms, where the same data is addressed seamlessly on-premises and in public or private clouds.

A bid for EMC by Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell would be another sign of how committed he is to transforming the onetime PC kingpin into an enterprise computing market leader, solution providers said.

Stealth high-performance storage technology developer Graphite Systems expands EMC's flash storage solution set with the possibility of developing all-flash systems on which applications can be run without a separate server.

CTO and Executive Chairman Larry Ellison told financial analysts they should stop thinking of on-premises and cloud-based databases separately because Oracle will bring them together with Exadata-as-a-service capabilities at Oracle OpenWorld.